Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

My blue prison jacket—already a bit faded—has large pockets and I always carry one of my smaller books in it. A Short History of the United States and The Causes of Population Decline are both small, and they fit very comfortably. I read during my five-minute breaks at the shoe factory.

The first sentence of The Causes of Population Decline says: “In the first thirty years of the twenty-first century the population of the earth declined by one-half, and it is still declining.” To read things like this, that consider the nature of all of human life, and at far-off times, fascinates me for reasons that I do not understand.

I do not know how long ago the twenty-first century was, although I understand that it is more recent than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that my history book is about. But I was never taught about “centuries” in the dormitory; I only know the meaning of the word from the dictionary: it divides up human history into groups of one hundred years—of two hundred yellows.

The twenty-first century must have been a long time ago. For one thing, there are no mentions of robots in the book.

Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide has the date 2135 on it, and I know from reading history that the date is from the twenty-second century.

Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.

The robots in the Audel’s book are shown in pictures and diagrams. They are all of a very simple kind made for elementary chores like fieldwork and record keeping.

Gone With the Wind resembles some of the films I know. It is, I think, a made-up story. It is about some silly people in big houses, and about a war. I don’t think I will ever finish it, since it is very long.

Many of the other books make no sense at all to me. Still, they seem to fit into some larger, only dimly clear, pattern.

What I like most is the strange sensation I get in the little hairs at the back of my neck when I read certain sentences. And, oddly enough, there are sentences that are often quite unclear to me, or that make me sad. I still remember this one from my days in New York:

I will stop writing now, and go back to reading. My life is very strange.

I read continuously, and take no sopors and smoke no marijuana. I read until I can stay awake no longer and fall in bed and lie there with my mind whirling and with faces and people and ideas from the past crowding and confusing me until, exhausted, I fall asleep.

And I am learning new words. Thirty or forty a day.

Long before robots and Privacy, mankind had a violent and astonishing history. I hardly know how to think or feel about some of the dead people I have read of, and of the great events. There is the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and the Great Flood of Fire and World War III and the Denver Incident. I was taught as a child that all things before the Second Age were violent and destructive because of a failure to respect individual rights; but it was never more specific than that. We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”

I am amazed to think of the number of people who must have screamed and died on battlefields in order to fulfill the ambitions of presidents and emperors. Or of the aggregation into the hands of some large groups of people, like the United States of America, great reserves of wealth and power, denied to most others.

And yet, despite all this, there seemed to have been good and kind men and women. And many of them happy.

The back part of Holy Bible is about Jesus Christ. Some sentences in it have been underlined by a former reader.

Jesus Christ died violently when he was still young, but before he died he said and did a great many striking things. He cured many sick people and talked strangely to many others. Some of the underlined sayings resemble what I was taught in my Piety classes. “The kingdom of God is within you,” for example, sounds much like our being taught to seek fulfillment only inwardly, through drugs and Privacy. But others of his sayings are quite different. “Ye must love one another” is one of these. Another one that is very strong is: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” And another: “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

If someone should come to me and say, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” I would want with all my strength to believe him. I want those things: a way, the truth, and life.

As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With the Wind , or a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

I think my writing is improving. I know more words, and the making of sentences comes more easily.

I have read all of my books, except for Gone With the Wind and The Art of the Dance , and I want more. Five nights ago the doors were unlocked again and Belasco and I went back to the abandoned building and searched it thoroughly, but we found no more books.

I must have more to read! When I think of all those books in the basement of the library in New York I hunger to be back there.

In New York I saw some films that showed prison escapes. And in those prisons the guards were human and vigilant, while here ours are only moron robots.

But there are these metal bracelets that cannot be deactivated for more than a half day at a time. And how would I get to New York if I escaped?

In the Backpacking book there is a map of what is called the Eastern Seaboard; North and South Carolina are on this map, and so is New York. If I walked along the beach, keeping the ocean on my right, I would come to New York. But I have no idea how far it is.

Cooking Shore Dinners tells about finding clams and other things to eat on beaches. I could feed myself that way, if I escaped.

And I could copy this journal, in smaller writing, on the thin paper I found with the box of books and carry it with me in my pocket. But I could not carry all the books.

And there is no way to remove the bracelets. Unless there is something that would cut them.

In the shoe factory there is a very large machine that cuts the sheets of plastic that the shoes are made from. It has a shining blade of adamant steel that cuts through about twenty sheets of tough plastic at a single stroke. There is a robot guard by the machine, and no human worker is supposed to go near it. But I have noticed that at times the guard seems dormant; he may be a nearly senile robot that has been assigned to the simple task of standing by a machine.